Protection of children online, research

This research explores the pathways through which children encounter violent content online, the impact this can have, and perceptions and use of safety measures. It also provides an overview of children’s description of what violent content looks like, which they said was an ‘unavoidable’ part of being online.

Content warning: This report contains mention of potentially distressing themes regarding children’s experiences with violent content, including sexual violence. The report contains generalised descriptions of specific pieces of violent content, but detailed descriptions have been omitted.

This research explores the pathways through which children encounter content related to suicide, self-harm and eating disorders, the impact this can have, and perceptions of safety measures. It also provides an overview of children’s description of what content promoting suicide, self-harm and eating disorders looks like online, which children in our sample had high level of familiarity with and characterised it as being prolific on social media.

Content warning: This report contains distressing discussions of children and young people’s experiences with suicide, self-harm and eating disorder content and behaviours.

This research explores the pathways through which children are exposed to cyberbullying, the impact this can have, and perceptions of what works to address cyberbullying. It also explored what cyberbullying looks like among children, which was said to happen anywhere children interacted online and tended to concentrate on whichever platforms were most popular at the time.

Children face a range of risks online, and the harms they may experience can be complex and nuanced. The severity of harm can also vary between children. In light of this complexity, we need to understand the mechanisms by which online content and conduct may give rise to harm.

This research explored how different risk factors combine to increase the likelihood of harm to children. The findings help us understand what is needed to keep children safe online. We will use them to inform our online safety work, including our guidance to regulated services on how they meet their duties.

Our research has found that while most children between 8 and 17 have a profile on at least one social media platform, some are younger than the minimum age required to use that platform. When a child enters a false age to gain access to the platform, as they get older, so does their false 'user age'. This puts them at greater risk of encountering age-inappropriate or potentially harmful content.

We wanted to estimate the proportion of children who have a false 'user age' on their online profile, making them appear older than they actually are.

2023 data

2022 data

Social media platforms publish advice on staying safe online, but there are concerns that children don’t engage with this information. Serious games have been shown to help engage people with content to improve their safety online, but there is limited empirical evidence on this.

Ofcom’s Behavioural Insight Hub designed a simple serious game, and carried out a pilot randomised controlled trial (RCT) to test the effectiveness of a serious game to keep children safe online.